A Year at Baraza

The past year has given us time to consider our experience editing this online space for critical reflection on the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. As editors of Baraza, we have been grateful for the exposure to our peers’ work and how we ourselves gained from the exchanges of the editorial process.

So after a year, why do we still think this online space is important?

One reason is that it provides an important intellectual exercise: authoring work accessible to a broader audience. As aspiring specialists in a variety of world regions studying everything from modern novels to ancient conceptions of science, it is easy for us to fall into the trap of jargon. Not everyone uses the word “deploy” outside the context of military movements or speaks several non-European languages, but when writing for an audience of specialists, it is easy to make these assumptions. As we edit Baraza, we have been, and aim to continue, cultivating a platform which encourages writing that engages a wide array of interests. Ultimately, this accessibility attracts feedback from a diverse range of people, sometimes even scholars and public figures — as with novelist Minna Sif’s engagement with Mara Lasky’s post on Sif’s Massalia Blues.

Accessibility also lends itself to another important aspect of our fields: interdisciplinary reflection. Authors learn how to receive different forms of feedback. As readers, we have benefited from exposure to different types of pieces that draw on literatures and types of evidence outside of our own field. For example, reading Cristina Violante’s post on valves and technologies of hygiene in the Middle East and Joy Garnett’s “Cross Pollination”, we were able to see how history, sociology, literature, and the study of power, when mixed well, can yield fascinating insights. Finally, accessibility can also mean striking a more reflective tone, as we saw in Shiv Subramaniam’s piece titled “The Question & the Kelvi” on listening, reading and the Kelvi.

As editors, we have been grateful for the chance to engage with students and faculty within our department, the wider Columbia community, and elsewhere outside of campus. As we solicited pieces, we were able to develop important editor-writer relationships, and as we workshopped together, we had the chance to critically engage with each others’ thought processes. Professionally, we have benefited from building up a network of students and faculty with whom we have worked together — often over a period of several weeks or even months — in editing, exchanging ideas, and finally posting and circulating to an audience of colleagues. Baraza has given us an opportunity to focus on our editing skills by engaging horizontally with our peers. As students, we devote countless hours to editing our own work, so having a chance to see others’ writings and to work with our peers to implement suggestions has been rewarding and beneficial for our editing and writing skills.

We wish to conclude this very fruitful year at Baraza by thanking everyone in the department and outside who have read, written for, and offered feedback on our posts. And, we hope a yet more engaging future for Baraza because it is more than just a blog; it is a space that is capable of exceeding the limits of the academic.

The Electoral Hawa

Chautala election rally (author's photo).
Chautala election rally (author’s photo).

Election results in India are not merely an aggregate of atomistic decisions made on the polling day. Even before the first vote is cast, a significant degree of synchronization has usually already taken place in the voting choices of the vast majority of the electorate. One of two scenarios usually obtains. Either a candidate wins by a huge margin, or, if the contest is a close one, the overwhelming majority of votes are split between the top two contenders. In other words, only those candidates who are perceived as having a real chance of winning are catapulted to victory, while others receive little more than scraps.

The concept of the electoral hawa (lit. breeze, wind) denotes, in lay usage, the creation of this perception of winnability. It is a notoriously ambiguous term, whose usage spans the entire spectrum from the buzz created at the electoral betting market (satta bazaar) to the more profound process through which the entire electorate is said to make up its mind. Part of this productive linguistic ambiguity stems from the fact that the hawa ‘reaches’ different people in different ways, depending upon their location within society and their involvement in politics. Only those who are involved in creating the hawa, i.e. politicians, or those involved in diagnosing its direction, i.e. the satta bazaar operatives, can be said to possess anything like a bird’s eye view of it. For most of the rest of the electorate, who observe politics from a distance, the hawa becomes discernible only when, having turned into an aandhi (a seasonal storm), it is already upon them.

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Teaching to Learn

Last year, I was “just” a graduate student. My primary relationship to knowledge was one of pursuit. Many of my classes seemed designed to help me both focus and expand my interests, all the while introducing me to a rich set of concepts and contemporary debates. In lecture, I listened and took notes; in seminars, we discussed and debated. In the library, it felt like we were all learning how to read slower and faster at the same time.

Now I am also a teaching assistant, suddenly responsible for knowledge in new ways. TAing Arabic has been my first truly public, prolonged experience of both authority over and accountability to a group of students. They come to my office hours. They solicit my feedback, consider my advice, and assume that I will be able to answer their questions. Suddenly my words, a year ago mere conjecture and reflection, are now treated as a definitive answer. And there is nothing quite like having someone write down what you say.

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Imperial Flush: Crane Co. Valves in Yemen and Saudi Arabia

Valve World Image
Image from Crane Co.’s trade magazine, The Valve World (September-October 1932, 166).

In America today, showering daily is a social norm. We avoid body odor, grease, and sweat, and consider such qualities unhygienic or “gross.” We also consider the technologies behind the daily shower – bathrooms, sewers, and heating systems and the parts that construct them valves and pipes – to be commonplace. Their omnipresence makes them unlikely to warrant a second thought. Despite this, our methods of cleaning ourselves have social, commercial, and even political implications.

Mass-produced valves, showers, and water heaters have only appeared in the past century. Crane Company, an American manufacturer of pipes, fittings, and valves, boasts on its website that in the 1920s it “conceive[d] the idea of the modern bathroom,” designating the American bathroom as “a sign of affluence and social pride.” The bathrooms we use today are really only a century old, as are the norms associated with them.

Over the 1920s, Crane Co. advertisers created concepts like “body odor” to form a consumer base for their new product: bathroom fixtures. Through magazine advertisements and bathroom showrooms, bathrooms became increasingly prevalent, and daily showers more common. Skyscrapers, factories, and hospitals all began to include water supply and sewer systems.

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The (Jewish) Christian Question

Freud cartoon
By David Levine

A comment on Gil Anidjar’s paper “Jesus and Monotheism” and its discussion at the MESAAS department colloquium on September 11th.

Murder, it soon becomes clear, goes far beyond the “who-done-it?” digressions, down which Freud (and Anidjar) takes his readers. This word designates more than a crime, far more than an action. It describes a kind of relation: the relation of a father to his sons, of a son to his father, of a people to their leader and, ultimately, of Christianity to Judaism.

What Anidjar terms “the Christian question” is an inquiry about this relation. But this inquiry is not about Christianity’s relation to just anyone. It is what we arrive at when we turn the screw of “the Jewish question” one more time. When we ask what it is about Christianity that so persistently maintains this relation—“murder”—to its Others. Certainly this question goes far beyond “the Jewish” one, but in Anidjar’s reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, the “(Jewish) Christian question” takes center stage.

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Between Miracle and Afterthought: Hebrew in MESAAS

My parents, native Israelis with wide and deep ties to the Hebrew language, insisted, always, on maintaining a Hebrew-speaking household in the U.S. so that my two sisters and I might carry on in the world with “a miracle” of a language at our disposal. I remember my father telling me excitedly that, “before 1948, no one made love in Hebrew!” I was fascinated by the thought of a language existing by virtue of some dedicated people carefully applying ancient, known words to their contemporary surroundings. I would imagine them staring at birds or one another in an attempt to string together some sounds and silences that might do justice to a subject’s fullest character.

But studying Hebrew literature in MESAAS has been one long attempt to bend my thinking to accommodate the reality that modern Hebrew literature is a contemporary Middle Eastern affair. Or is it? Hebrew literature and Israeli culture fits into MESAAS geographically; but Hebrew has long been a shared cultural language of the Jews that only in the 20th century became a spoken vernacular in Israel. A question of belonging arises: how does modern Hebrew literature fit into MESAAS when we look beyond basic points of contact, such as the Semitic origins of the Hebrew language or the many centuries of political-Zionist poetry?

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Teaching Notes III: Islamic Studies and “de-programming”

For those of us who teach or will be teaching an introductory course of Islamic Studies in the United States, there are a number of pedagogical challenges we uniquely face as instructors. In order to reach a deep and critical engagement with the texts, histories, aesthetics, narratives and politics at play in a course such as “Islamic Civilization,” a form of “de-programming” must take place.

I say “de-programming” because instructors are certainly not engaging with “blank slates.” Many students enter our classes having already developed an idea or opinion of Islam, Muslims and related terminology (such as shari’a, jihad, Islamic state, burka, etc.), and this is reflected in their questions and papers. Here’s a sampling of the questions I received through an exercise I conducted at the end of the last academic term:

“What makes Islam hate Israel?” “What is the burka?” “Do mainstream Muslims read the Qur’an?” “Is there such a thing as Islam without belief in God (Allah)?” “Should Muslims get the blame for human misery?” “Is a democratic and religious state possible?” “When do most Muslims visit Mecca (what part of their life)?” “What is the Muslim position on human nature?”

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Reanimating Baraza: A Look Back

After a hiatus, the editorial collective is reanimating Baraza and is excited about its future. This is the first post in a summer series that will feature the new type of content you can expect to see on the site as well as ways of engaging the virtual community. But before fully introducing what’s new, let’s take a look back to the first post by the editorial collective on Baraza from Feb. 3, 2012.

Timeless Tradewinds and Markets of the Mind

Markets, Manthia Diawara has written, are the best reflections of society. His discussion, in the West African context, emphasizes markets as grand public spaces of experience and exchange, “a meeting place for the employed and the unemployed, the young and the old, women and men, the intellectual, and the peasant. They are a site for new generative forces, for the transfiguration of old concepts, and for revitalization.”

Travel writing from Ibn Batutta to today’s Rough guides has often chosen to use bazaars and other markets as emblems for distant, chaotic and antique lands. In reality, these spaces of intense human interaction form an intersection where the world presents itself to the heart of local societies. One would not be surprised to find, in a village market in Northern Ghana, a Lebanese merchant selling Chinese goods. Diawara reports the West African saying: “visit the market and see the world.”
Baraza is the modern academic avatar of the timeless market space. Created for intellectual exchange, the forum focuses on issues relevant to the past, present and future of the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. The forum’s name mirrors the long history of intellectual, commercial and cultural exchange between these three regions. The Swahili word baraza traces its lineage from Persian and evokes the sense of a public meeting as well as the physical space where meetings take place. It finds a cognate in the Hindi/Urdu word bazar that is commonly employed across South Asia.
As a salon-styled forum, with both online and on campus elements for students at the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department at Columbia University, baraza will not content itself with disciplinary or geographic borders nor will it limit itself to well-established genres of academic and popular discourse. Through the intersection and interaction of the timeless and timely, the local and the global, the dynamic and the rigorous, from the market of ideas and exchange that baraza offers, the intellectual can expect to leave with new units of analysis, new methodologies, and new forms of presentation responsive to contemporary social realities and current technological imperatives.
Message from the Editorial Collective 2011-2012
Since the first post, Baraza has facilitated critical reflection on the Middle East, South Asia and Africa through short and longer form writing, streaming web video of discussions of publicly-engaged scholars, and hosting collaborative events events on Columbia University’s campus.
While our old web site peaked with respectable levels of traffic, we have decided to scale down the operation from a quasi-journal format to more of a blog for academics. In the meantime, we have  moved the website to Columbia University’s servers as well as filed an eISSN number to insure the longevity of our our content. In other words, as far as most mainline bibliographic resources are concerned, we are official!